The Internet and other communications networks are being used by employment recruiting companies. Trends have emerged in the strategy and tactics that Internet-based employment recruiting companies are deploying to compete with a plethora of both large and small competitors, including employers directly. These trends are driven by the predictable specialization that occurs in any industry as it begins to mature.
Internet marketing strategy is becoming more local in its market targeting in two ways. First, it is becoming more industry specific, and, second, it is becoming more specific to local geographic markets. In every large city, traditional newspaper advertising is in broad decline, particularly with respect to the employment want ads section. It is rapidly becoming all about vertical markets in local communities. This two focus is rapidly becoming determinants in the definition of market share. Witness the success of www.nwjobs.com in the Pacific Northwest, or the increasingly local emphasis of www.monster.com. Because of these realizations, large recruiting competitors are now beginning to buy up niche and boutique firms, a clear indication of consolidation.
The recruiting industry is also evolving technologically, as do all. Coming very soon is highly specialized and very covert search engines that will silently crawl every crevice and website on the Internet looking for job seekers that the recruiting companies can exploit. These engines will report all of the data (resumes, etc.) they find 24/7 to their commanders. Employers will soon learn to appreciate the time and cost-saving value of such tools, and these tools will develop into products that job seekers can buy and use in reverse to find employers.
This new technology will also create a secondary issue and opportunity with the enormous amounts of employment data that will need to be sorted, categorized, rated, and otherwise made useful. Efficient management of this employment data will differentiate between those who use the technology successfully and those who fail. The opportunity to create a methodology to manage this data is momentary.
A very similar need exists for employers directly. For example, in the third week of June 2006, one of the three major television networks featured a nightly news presentation of a San Francisco restaurant owner who needed to hire a new cashier. This owner advertised in two locations, a want ad in one of the two local newspapers and an Internet posting on the locally based www.craigslist.com. From the first, the owner got 4 responses. From the second, the owner got over 400 responses. How will this busy owner find the time to sort the best responses from the second marketing approach?
Another example is even more useful, and all of us have seen it on television. One Internet-based dating company created the concept of a computer-managed profile-matching service based on questionnaires. The greater the statistical match, the more likely the compatibility, and the more likely the long term relationship. This insight revolutionized the Internet dating industry, and a very similar opportunity exists within the Internet-based employment recruiting industry.
There have been attempts in other industries to match people based on entered profiles. See, for example: 1. www.self-directed-search.com/aboutsds.html. 2. www.eHarmony.com 3. www.match.com, etc.
Thus, it is desirable to provide overcome these and other problems associated with career management assessment matching.